Going Off Script Read online

  I was too young to feel scared by the big upheaval, or upset that I wouldn’t have a chance to say good-bye to my friends back in Naples. I’m sure Monica and Pasquale dealt with more conflicting emotions, since they were already in junior high, but I was thrilled. I was the giant baby bigfoot golden-haired special angel child—what could possibly go wrong, ever?

  After six months at Giulio’s house, we ended up settling into an apartment building on a busy thoroughfare called River Road, which ran through Bethesda, Maryland, and across the D.C. line. We were on the Maryland side, and instead of a 19th-century piazza, there was a 7-Eleven across the street. My father soon opened a shop called Eduardo’s in a fancy mall in Georgetown and quickly became the tailor to politicians, athletes, and other well-heeled Washingtonians. His star was rising just as mine came crashing down.

  Enrolled in public school, I didn’t know a word of English, so I spent my days doodling at my desk. Nobody could pronounce my name, so the teachers decided I would be Julie from then on. (Was it so impossible to just add the extra three letters, people? It’s not like ana is hard to say; it’s phonetic, for godsakes.) But wait, there were lots of Julies, so I would have to be Julie D. The other kids thought I was stupid, because I didn’t speak or understand anything they were saying. I was Julie D., the weird mute girl with (still) big feet. Even my golden hair was unremarkable now: I was drowning in a sea of little blond girls, and most of them had blue eyes to up the ante. Stripped of my identity, my voice, and my singular claim to beauty, one thing about America was perfectly clear:

  My fifteen minutes were up, and I was only six years old.

  chapter two

  In America, I became a latchkey kid. Babbo and Mama would work long hours at the shop, and, keeping with Italian custom, we never had dinner before 9:30 at night. Over our bowls of fresh pasta, Babbo always asked us whether we had learned any new English words and phrases that day. Monica and Pasquale were taking language lessons at Berlitz, but I was on my own, daydreaming at the public school either in the back of the classroom or with four other ESOL kids sitting around a table. My parents assumed I was young enough that English would just come naturally to me, and amazingly, it did. For the first time in my life, I felt superior to my older brother and sister, and I loved rubbing it in during Babbo’s evening quizzes, piping up with an ever-growing repertoire of words and phrases while Pash and Mon still spun their wheels on “Hi, how are you?”

  The importance of learning this strange new language had become painfully clear to me that first Christmas in the States, when Uncle Giulio took me and my siblings along with his three kids to Toys R Us for a dream-come-true shopping spree. “You have five minutes to go get whatever you want,” he told us. My brother, sister, and cousins all sped off to stockpile as much high-ticket loot as they could—bikes, electric cars, Ataris, video games. Vincent, my brainiac cousin, homed in on jigsaw puzzles and all the best board games. I made a beeline for the dolls.

  My heart was set on one thing and one thing only: a baby doll with bodily functions. It had to be able to pee and go poo. I was certain I had seen such a doll on a TV commercial, but I didn’t know what it was called. I started turning over boxes to see if any dolls had the necessary holes. I couldn’t read the English descriptions, but the pictures promised me that some could blink, or cry, or even crawl. You could change their diapers, but there was nothing in them. That did not meet my quality-control standards. I didn’t want to pretend. I wanted reality, dammit. I gladly would have taken an actual baby, but my parents weren’t cooperating, and Toys R Us didn’t have a human trafficking aisle. So I proceeded to pick up doll after doll, determined to find the holy pooping grail. Legions of Barbies smirked prettily from their chic townhouses and sporty convertibles, but Barbie didn’t even wear underwear, let alone diapers. I could have gotten her a Cinderella ball gown and made her run off with the Incredible Hulk on an Erik Estrada CHiPs moped. But that is NOT. WHAT. I. WANTED. Instead, I stood rooted there in the middle of the toy store with my empty cart until my mother came and found me. “Piccerella!” she cried. “Little one.” I usually took comfort in her pet name for me, but time was running out on Uncle Giulio’s beat-the-clock extravaganza, and sympathy wasn’t going to cut it. “Everyone has full carts!” Mama fretted, trying to goad me into action. “Look, here’s a baby doll you can give a bath and feed, how about that?” I shook my head, on the verge of tears. I didn’t want the food to go in as much as I wanted it to come out. Was it so much to ask for a doll with a working digestive tract? “But I saw it on TV,” I wailed. If it was on TV, it had to be real, right?

  My mother flagged down a salesperson for help, only to remember too late that neither one of us knew enough English to even begin to explain the problem. “Hi, how are you?” we politely asked, before breaking into excited Italian, pointing at our v-jays and pleading “pee-pee, pee-pee!” The salesperson smiled, nodded reassuringly, and gestured for us to follow. They have it! I’m going to get my doll! I thought, grinning in gratitude at this savior who was leading us so purposefully straight to…the ladies’ room. Back I dashed to the doll aisle, with Mama now nearly as frantic as I was (not to mention utterly humiliated, but that was more her than me). We passed Monica and Pasquale drunk on greed, pushing their teetering carts toward the register. Finally, Mama and I found a doll that could actually pee after you gave her a bottle. Thrilled with the prospect of changing a diaper that was at least wet, I hurried back to the checkout lane to join the rest of the family. “Is that it?” Uncle Giulio asked in surprise. I nodded and happily cradled my prize. “Where’s your cart?” the other kids wanted to know. They couldn’t believe I had wasted all my time looking for a single toy. How dumb was I? But I was satisfied. I knew exactly what I wanted, and once I had it, that was all I needed. Nothing else mattered. That one-track mindset would end up leading me to many of my sweetest triumphs and most bitter disappointments throughout life. And the pissing doll definitely went into the win column.

  —

  While we were nowhere near my uncles’ league, our fortunes rose quickly in D.C. Babbo couldn’t have chosen a better time to open up shop as a master European tailor in the nation’s capital. The frumpy Carter administration had just been voted out, and the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan was ushering in an era of formal entertaining and couture style that put Babbo’s craftsmanship in high demand with the A-listers. His clientele soon included big-name athletes, politicians, pundits, and rainmakers. We moved across the Potomac River to a townhouse in the Virginia suburb of Springfield, where our modest end unit seemed as grand as the White House itself to me. I had my own room for the first time. Aside from tending to my incontinent doll, though, there wasn’t much to keep me occupied during the long afternoons and evenings I spent by myself after school while my parents worked and my siblings went about their teenaged lives. I was lonely and bored, until I made my first—and most loyal—friend in America. Her name was Barbara.

  Barbara kept me company every day, and she always spoke to me clearly and directly. Her voice was pleasant, and she never tried to make me understand unfamiliar words by speaking louder or more slowly. Barbara was everything I yearned to be someday: pretty, in-the-know, and completely unflappable. She was cool in the face of any calamity. And calamity, I learned, was all around me. All the time. The emergency landing when we were flying to America was just a taste of the dangers that loomed here. People were constantly getting shot down in the street, or run over in crosswalks by drunk drivers or city buses, or carjacked at gunpoint, or tied up and beaten by home invaders who took their valuables. They were horribly burned in house fires ignited by Christmas trees, and trapped in wrecked cars, and buried beneath collapsed buildings. They became lost for days in snowbound mountains, scorching deserts, or storm-tossed seas. Children were routinely kidnapped while walking to school or shopping with their parents. People got eaten by sharks, alligators, and sometimes zoo animals. They were fatally struck by lightning whil
e playing golf, or shot by crazy postal workers. In America, the most unimaginable nightmares came true every single day. I had this all on very good authority from Barbara.

  I had never actually met Barbara, but I admired her deeply, trusted her implicitly, and mimicked her earnestly for hours on end in front of my bedroom mirror. Barbara Harrison anchored the evening news on the local NBC affiliate, and watching her broadcast was the highlight of my day. I had to be the only second-grader in America more familiar with the Falklands War than the Fonz. The live footage and packaged features on the news always kept me riveted to the TV screen, and, of course, the images illustrated what everyone was talking about as they said it. Even better, the reporters spoke in short, simple sentences. English began to make perfect sense, and I became the first in my family to master it. I was just too terrified to leave the house and use it.

  “Mama, I need you to come home right now!” I would implore, dialing the shop so often and with such rising panic that my parents would eventually have to give up and send Mama to rescue me from the serial killers, home invaders, and Freddy Krueger psychopaths I was sure were trying to break in that very second. Monica was supposed to be watching me, but her m.o. was to offer me five bucks to keep my mouth shut while she went to hang out with her friends. “Listen, you little brat, you’re going to stay in the corner and watch TV,” she would warn me. “I swear,” I would promise, snatching the bill from her hand. She pretty much always got a full refund, and hell to pay from our parents. I’d last maybe an hour at most before freaking out and calling my parents to rat my sister out. The fear factor was actually worse when my siblings were there. They preferred R-rated horror movies to the evening news, and once you’ve seen Friday the 13th for the fourteenth time, the only thrill left is in convincing your little sister that it’s a documentary based on a true story.

  Oddly enough, even though Naples has often ranked at or near the top of the list of Europe’s most violent cities, the mafioso bloodshed and street crime never seemed to faze me there. We would go back every summer to visit, and I remember one time when I was eight or nine years old, and a bunch of us were playing at my friend Rosaria’s apartment on the top floor of our building in the old neighborhood. Suddenly, we heard a commotion outside, and Mama, Babbo, and all the grownups started yelling up at us from the apartment balcony below. “Bambini, bambini! Get inside! Close the door!” Of course, we all immediately ran outside to peer over Rosaria’s terrace and see what was going on. I saw a man with a hat on extend his arm and shoot someone, then get in a car and drive away. I saw the other man’s body fall. It scared the shit out of me, but I didn’t want to look like a baby, so I followed the other kids back inside to finish watching our cartoon. (Denial is second only to soccer as a national sport in Italy.) I don’t recall any sirens or police crime tape or homicide investigators swarming the neighborhood. That’s not how it worked. In Naples, the game was six degrees of Mafia, and even if you were an eyewitness to murder, you minded your own business. This was a town where eleven-year-old boys drove getaway vans.

  On our first trip back to Naples, I appointed myself chief cultural critic, and kept up a running commentary on how inferior Naples was; after barely a year, I was a bona fide ugly American in miniature. “Che schifo,” I complained about the garbage everywhere. “How gross.” The familiar racket of Vespas, vendors, and kids playing soccer in the street was also suddenly intolerable. “Listen to all this traffic!” I whined. “People should be arrested for making so much noise!” My Italian relatives, friends, and old neighbors all got the same unsolicited advice: “You should move to America with us,” I loftily urged them. “America is clean. Naples is disgusting.”

  The second summer back, I went from insufferable to insufferable and creepy. I must have been in the throes of some weird giant-baby flashback, because as soon as we were back in Naples, I started badgering my mother to buy me a pacifier, which I suspect she finally did only because the advantage of plugging my mouth shut outweighed the humiliation of traipsing around town with a tall-for-her-age nine-year-old sucking on a binky. It wasn’t as if she could just dart into a CVS or Walgreens to buy one with no questions asked. In Italy, drugstores are tiny neighborhood farmacias, whose owners know and greet each customer by name.

  “Ciao, Anna! What are you looking for?” the pharmacist asked as soon as we walked in.

  “Oh, nothing, really, just a pacifier,” Mama breezily replied. As an actress, I ranked her right up there with Naples’s most famous daughter, Sophia Loren. No one would have guessed how epically pissed she was at me right then.

  “Whose baby?” the pharmacist wanted to know. He knew every binky-sucker in a ten-block radius. “How old is the baby? Is it just starting to use a pacifier?”

  I had a bad feeling about the direction this was taking. It was as if I could hear Mama’s last nerve snap.

  “Listen,” she confided to the nosy pharmacist. “Our baby is nine years old! It’s for this crazy person next to me! Do you have pacifiers for nine-year-olds?”

  “Mama!” I protested, too late. The pharmacist was looking at me in disbelief. Like I was some kind of freak, instead of a perfectly normal third-grader with a perfectly reasonable request.

  “Why you acting crazy, Giuliana?” the pharmacist asked me. I tried to make up some feeble story on the spot about wanting it for a doll. To be honest, I couldn’t fully explain why I wanted it. I just thought it would be fun to chew on all day. Obviously there was some mental issue going on there, and three decades later, I still do not want to know what it was, thank you very much. The binky is the whole reason that I don’t want to be hypnotized to get over my fear of flying, even though I hear there’s this great hypnotherapist in Santa Monica who could cure me in a few sessions. I’m too scared of whatever else might get dredged up, attached to the end of that stupid pacifier. I can just see the hypnotist telling me to relax, and to picture the plane’s engine revving up, and then suddenly I blurt out: “I was touched!” When I relayed this whole hilarious (I thought) scenario to my fake therapists on the E! crew, everyone fell silent on set and said there was nothing funny about it. What they don’t get is how overactive my imagination is, and how I trained it from a very young age to visualize things that hadn’t happened—like me being crowned Miss USA, and anchoring the evening news—so my childhood dreams would come true. What if that same mechanism has some trick lever I don’t know about, and under hypnosis I falsely accuse someone—say, Cookie Monster—of molesting me? I’d rather take an Ambien and sleep through a long flight than risk revealing some deep-rooted shit during a hypnosis session. The pacifier was just my gateway tranquilizer. I popped it into my mouth as soon as we left the farmacia, and no amount of ridicule from my family could make me stop.

  Back home in the States, I at least had the good sense to lose the pacifier, but I was still decidedly weird. I had earned that label back in the second grade, when my teacher asked the class to draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up. All the boys drew astronauts or firemen or basketball players, while all the girls drew mommies or cheerleaders or veterinarians. I drew my floating head behind a big desk with a microphone on it. “I want to be an American anchorwoman,” I announced in my thick Italian accent. Everybody giggled. “Julie, that’s so sweet,” the teacher chided me, “but to be an anchorwoman, you can’t have an accent. You have to speak perfect English. How about a Redskins cheerleader?” I was devastated. If I closed my eyes, I could see myself delivering the news. I wasn’t about to ditch my imaginary TV career for a couple of pom-poms. I just needed more practice, was all. I redoubled my efforts.

  When I wasn’t mimicking Barbara Harrison at home, I sat in front of my bedroom mirror pretending to be Oprah. I would act like I was interviewing Matt Dillon. I loved him from The Outsiders. And Ralph Macchio from The Karate Kid. I would ask them if they had a girlfriend, what they liked in a girl. Blondes or brunettes? Would they ever marry a regular girl or would they only marry a c
elebrity? Basically, the “hard-hitting” questions I still ask on the red carpet. Then, when Fake Oprah was done interviewing all her invisible, famous guests, I would flop across my bed with my head hanging over the edge and listen carefully to Eddie Murphy’s Delirious album on my record player. Eddie was an excellent English coach. Eddie taught me how to curse like an American. Upside down. My whole family cursed frequently and extravagantly in Italian, and speaking any language without the ability to swear would have been like singing opera with just a one-octave range. Once again, Berlitz was miserably failing Monica and Pasquale, who were being drilled on crucial vocabulary lessons (“Is that your dog?” “How much are the oranges?”) while Eddie Murphy was showing me how to effortlessly drop the f-bomb in any situation. So that honky bitch of a second-grade teacher could just kiss my sweet Italian ass, because I was going to be the best fucking anchorwoman in the U.S.A., goddammit. And Miss USA, too. I was going to be Miss U Expletive S of Undeleted A, too.

  Just to clarify: Beauty queen wasn’t so much my Plan B as it was my companion career to Plan A, unless, of course, there was a network out there with the foresight to have their anchors deliver the evening news wearing tiaras and ball gowns. Pageant mania ran in my family. We’d get out our pencils and paper, make a big bowl of popcorn, and settle in for a happy night around the TV to cheer on our favorite contestants and mercilessly heckle the rest. Babbo was the most intense, especially during the Miss Universe pageant, which we had watched back in Italy, too. Babbo would work himself into a lather when Miss Italy appeared. “She is a dog!” he would rail. “This, a country full of so many beautiful women, and this is who they chose?” The judges must have felt the same way, because Italy never even made the finals when we were watching.